Conversations with a 4-year-old

In the bathroom:

Me: Eva, it’s time to take a shower.

Eva: I can’t.  Kitties hate water and I’m a kitty.

Dinnertime:

Me: Eva, come to dinner, please.

Eva: You can call me Dexter.

At Walgreens:

Eva: Let’s go look at the toys.

Me: Just a minute.  I’m looking at the cold medicine and then we’ll go look at the toys. 

Eva: (Wandering towards the toys with my shopping cart)  It’s okay, we can split up.

In the car headed to Fred Meyer:

Eva: If Playland is open, then I’ll go to Playland.  If it’s closed, then I’ll go with you and look at the toys.

Me: That sounds like a good plan.

Eva: Yeah, I just made it up.

Dinking around the house:

(Eva’s playing with her fishing pole and the magnet comes off the string.)

Me: I’ll glue that magnet back on for you in a minute.  Please don’t lose it.

Eva: Ok.

I look over to find Eva feeding the fishing pole line into the heating vent.

Me: Eva!  Did you drop the magnet down the heating vent?  We can’t get that back out.

Eva: Calm down, Mama.  It’s just a string.

Snuggling in bed:

Eva: Can I play on your phone?

Me: Not right now.

Eva: You've got to be kidding me!

Getting ready for bed:

Me: Eva, you’re getting to be a big girl now.  What do you think about not wearing a diaper to bed anymore? You can get up in the night and go pee in the potty instead.

Eva: (Pauses for a moment) I think I like peeing in my diaper.

Enough said.

Wanna See My Kids

If it was still cool to carry photos in your wallet, these are the photos I would have in my little plastic sheets. 

And I would be really obnoxious about showing people my kids.  Just like I’m doing right now.

Bottle Drop

Oregon charges a bottle deposit on any beverages that you purchase in the state.  It will cost ya just a nickel.  A nickel?  Riiight.

The only way to get your nickel back is to return your empty cans and bottles to a designated return site.  I hate returning cans but I also hate the idea of the state getting a bunch of free nickels out of me.  So I play along.  We have a couple large trash bags hanging in the laundry room and we throw all of our empty cans in them.  When the bags are bulging and making it impossible for me to move around in my tiny laundry room, it’s time to head to the Bottle Drop.  Then I procrastinate and kick the sacks around for another two weeks.

Since I try to only drink one soda a day and Michael drinks less than that, it takes months to accumulate enough cans to warrant a trip.  I had enough cans last week and decided it was time to face the Bottle Drop.  I loaded the sacks into my car, drove to the Bottle Drop, lugged them through the parking lot like a hobo, and went inside to surrender my dignity.

Here’s the thing.  The Bottle Drop smells rank.  Like really rank.  Like if booze were a sports team, then Bottle Drop smells like booze’s locker room.  The floor is sticky, the machines are sticky, and depending on when you go, there are plenty of creepy people inside.  And the machines are mean.  I was calmly feeding my cans into the slot and the machine kept flashing rude messages onto the screen.  “Don’t throw the cans!”  “Only one can at a time!”  “I gladly accept your dignity!”  Jerk.

Each time I go to the Bottle Drop I think, “Man, did I drink all this soda?  I should lay off.  This is a lot of soda.”  Then by the time I’m done, I’m parched and need a soda.  I also always think, “Woo-hoo-hoo!  I’m gonna be rich!”

I finished processing my cans and took my receipt over to scan at the money machine.  I rubbed my paws together and waited for me treasure to appear like a retiree in a Vegas casino.  Out scrambled my money.  $15.45.

Woo-hoo-hoo!  I’m rich!

Merry Christmas

We had the best Christmas!  We were blessed to go home to Idaho and spend the holiday with the people we love the most.  Incidentally, they are also the people who don’t care if we wear makeup or clean clothes.  It’s the ideal vacation.

Our only hope was that there would be snow.  Eva has been talking about playing in the snow in Idaho for months and I was worried her dreams would be slaughtered.  I didn’t need to worry because it snowed.  And snowed.  And snowed.  My daddy spent hours running his snow-blower up and down his neighborhood.  Our car almost got stuck in the snow.  It was a lot.  Eva loved it.

We were able to enjoy all the fun things that accompany Christmas; our annual gingerbread house competition (we didn’t win),  Swedish Christmas Eve dinner (I ate like a horse), Grandma Brown’s chicken noodle soup (I ate like a horse’s cousin), a jigsaw puzzle that was impossible to finish, conducting the train around the tree, seeing the Sasquatch Santa in Pendleton, and visiting dear friends.  We also had new adventures as well when Grandpa took us for ice cream at the Idaho Drug soda fountain.  The week was over too quickly. 

Eva didn’t bother to wake us up on Christmas morning and had her entire stocking emptied onto the floor and was starting in on her presents when Michael ran downstairs to stop her.  Then she had to patiently wait for Grandpa to come in from snow blowing the entire county before she could resume.  She was a good sport and was rewarded with the Princess Cupcake game she’s been asking for from Santa.  The old guy really delivered.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most exciting parts came courtesy of our dog.  We left Portland in the evening after Myke’s office Christmas party to drive as far as Pendleton.  Late at night and in the middle of nowhere, the inside of our car began to smell like a sewer.  We thought our dog had graced us with a flatulence, but after the smell didn’t dissipate with the windows down, I suspected something much fouler.    I looked back and there he was, teetering on top of our suitcase and hanging over the seat onto Eva's shoulder.  She was wailing out, “The dog’s stinky breath is on me!  Get him off!”  I knew that the dog had pooped in the back of the car.

Michael pulled over and hopped out to assess the poopage.  He opened the door and gasped, “Oh, no!” and then gagged.  It was poop all right.  The diarrhea kind.  And a nice pile of vomit as a consolation prize.  Our car was loaded to the brim, we had no garbage receptacles of any kind, and Eva was still hollering about the stinky dog breath in her face.  We had no choice but to litter.  And we littered good.  Michael rolled up the dog bed and chucked it into the sage brush on the side of the road.  Then we sped off into the darkness. 

We had guilt over breaking the law.  I’m not a litterbug and I really detest those who are. But we had no choice.  It was a poop emergency.  I quickly absolved my guilt but Michael had a harder time letting go of his sin.  He fretted that a gust of wind would pick up the poopy bed and slam it onto a car’s windshield, causing the driver to careen off the road and meet his death.  I laughed at the image and then told him to quit being ridiculous.  The worst thing that could happen is someone might stumble upon the dog bed and think he’d found a great treasure, only to be surprised with a diarrhea-vomit concoction.  That would be more tragic. 

But the most tragic thing of all happened when our dog decided he was nervous and needed to chew something.  He chose a wool Pendleton blanket at my parent’s house.  No problem. IT’S ONLY A TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLAR BLANKET, JACKASS!   Our dear dog is going to the kennel next time. I hope he finds something cheap to chew on there.  

Merry Christmas!

Treasures

Eva dinks with my phone a lot.  Sometimes she messes up my settings, sometimes she calls and texts people accidentally, always she returns it with a sticky and crusty screen. 

Occasionally I’ll find a treasure from her.  Like this:

That’s worth a crusty phone.

Snow Day

It snowed yesterday.  To borrow from Eva’s vocabulary:

I don’t love the snow.  I grew up in the snow and I honestly didn’t mind it until I became an adult and realized that snow sucks.  I’ve frozen my tongue to a flag pole, I’ve built snowmen and had snowball fights, I’ve sledded and skated down the street in my church shoes.  I’m done with snow.

But Eva is not.  Eva was so excited to see snow that she pulled up the blinds and sat by the window to watch it fall.  I desperately didn’t want to go outside but seeing my little baby gazing optimistically out the window yanked at my heart.  So I paraded into Michael’s office and told him he needed to build a snowman with his daughter.   He gave me some flimsy excuses about “being on the clock,” and “having to get his work done,” and “you’ll get out of my office if you know what’s good for you, woman.”  So I paraded right back out of his office and I volunteered to take Eva outside to build a snowman.  That’s how much I love my girl. 

Once I was into the groove, it was sort of fun.  (Minus my freezing cold hands.  Minus that I couldn’t bend over very well because my snow pants are tight.  Minus the pile of squishy dog poo I stepped in.)

But…we built a cute little fella

Then we had hot chocolate

And tie-dyed an apron

And made cinnamon rolls

Maybe a snow day ain’t so bad after all. 

But only one snow day.  No more.

Computer Games

We have an old label maker that Eva carries around and calls her computer.  It hasn’t had any label tape in it for years so she just types words on the screen and then erases them.  It’s been a great way to teach her how to spell.

Michael decided to be a nice guy and bought some replacement tape for it so Eva could actually print out the words she spells.  I have had the distinct honor of using my sausage fingers to pick up millions of tiny labels from off the floor; it’s hard work for my Jimmy Deans.  At least Michael didn’t show her that they are actually stickers.  (I promise you that man wouldn’t have any appendages left if he had hipped our daughter to that little fact.)  It took Eva approximately 4 days to use up an entire cassette of labels.  That’s a lot of garbage for me to pick up.

Eva spelled a lot of things with random smatterings of letters, but she also can spell actual words on her own.  Here are some things that Eva can spell without any help from her doofus parents.

And naturally,

I’m so proud.